


Black God

by dollarpound



Category: Red Dwarf
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-18
Updated: 2016-12-18
Packaged: 2018-09-09 13:58:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,633
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8893318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dollarpound/pseuds/dollarpound
Summary: Lister is visited by a cult of keytar playing Black Supremicists, Cat helps Kryten find out how to remove a warm bottle of Salad Cream from an androids rectal socket and Kochanski reflects on the metaphysics of George Berkeley





	

‘There was an odour, that is, it was smelled; there was a sound, that is to say, it was heard; a colour or figure, and it was perceived by sight or touch.’ *George Berkeley*

They came from the first age of tight clothing. Something about the colours and textures of 70’s polyester-polyurethane copolymer blends had an otherwordly feel to them. And so did the loudness and crudeness of the early experimental electronic sounds which hadn’t been domesticated to the purpouses of neat recognisable commercial music and sounded so jagged and metallic and howling. The stretchy elastane costumes were put to the test as the dancers began throwing themselves around the sleeping quarters which was full of smoke and lights and glitter and sequins and Egyptana and Native American appropriana as the mysterious stranger with the giant hat teleported in and the stageshow built the cacophony of keytar soloing to a smouldering climax.

‘Rock and roll!! Brutality!!’ applauded Lister.

‘Are you He?’ A strange question from a strange stranger.

‘Last time I looked I was a he, yeah.’ Maybe coming from the first age of tight stretchy clothing, they couldn’t tell.

‘No, not *a* he - *the* He. I mean are you the Lord?’ Had this freaky group of musicians who reminded Lister of the Sham Glam scene in 23rd century Liverpool, come to recruit his skills as an axe-man? Why now when he was having to overhaul his whole technique following the amputation of his right arm! Kryten told him about Django Reinhardt who had two fingers on his right hand but was one of the most revered guitarists of all time. Hendrix was left handed. These two facts had nothing to do with the possibility of Lister being a great guitarist. Which had more to do with that he couldn’t be bothered to really learn it properly for some reason.

‘Well, it depends who you’re asking... In a paralell dimension I’m God in a computer game of the whole world.’ This wasn’t true, or at least he had no grounds for knowing it. He had been made to think this by a genetically engineered squid as part of a group halucination shortly before they lost Red Dwarf but Lister was finding it increasingly hard to remember what was real these days...

‘You are the Black God. We have travelled across time and space in our funky spaceship to find you.’

‘Maybe wear looser clothing and move less vigourously?’

‘What?’

‘You said your spaceship was getting funky... nevermind just a crack.’

‘Is it true that you are the source of all Blackness in the Universe?’ Lister thought he was talking about black holes or something before he remembered his conversation with Julie Burchill and this whole black white thing she had.

‘That you have no black ancestry and through a cosmic conspiracy went back in time and deposited your baby self back into history.’ Lister’s world had a totally different taxonomy. There were GELFS, mechanoids, simulants, viruses, holograms and the occasional human. And the whole system was fraught with antagonisms and wounds and awkwardness. Anyway didn’t everyone have black ancestry? But these guys thought black and white were seperate. Alien. Conservatives always made things into aliens, like Rimmer and his smegging garbage pod. What the keytar cult seemed to have done was just invert it – make themselves into aliens, but it was the same thing in a way.

‘Well, that’s sort of partly true...’

‘You are self positing, like God, and you explain how blackness can be a real thing in its own right, not just defined negatively or subjectively.’ Lister had lost faith in real things a long time ago.

‘I don’t think I’m what you’re looking for. Do you want a jam tho’? I’ve lost my arm because of a disease but I’ve got a robot I could do the strumming for me.’ The musicians and dancers suddenly seemed nervous and panicky and began packing.

‘Sorry guys I guess you’ve got the next gig to get to.’ But before he completed the sentence they had teleported away in a spiral of joyfully sickly colours. It was true that Lister’s guitar playing was famous across time and space. But not in a good way.

cCO

Cat’s hand was up Krytens bum. Kryten was bent over the medibed trying to have a conversation too much. Cat was wearing bottomless skintight trousers and his buttocks were smoothed and glowing with Shea butter.

‘I just don’t see the attraction,’ Kryten was saying.

‘You don’t think Officer BB’s hot?’

‘No.’

‘Do you think *I’m* hot?’

‘No.’

‘Well there’s your answer then. Your hotness detector must be broken...’ Cat just couldn’t accept that there was a sexuality that excluded him from its purview. ‘Do you even know what hot is?’ Kryten had always thought that hot was an abbreviation for hotpoint. There was nothing wrong with his hotness detector, nor was there such a thing. Kryten was a machine and wanted to have sex with machines like a sex machine. As far as Cat was concerned, his copy of Webster’s just had a mirror under the word hot.

‘She hates me.’ Cat could feel himself about to say something wise, because he was wise, but rarely let himself be wise because he was so wise.

‘You only care that Kochanski hates you because you care about Lister. And that just winds her up even more. You don’t have to fancy Officer BB, you just have to respect her.’

‘I’m having an epiphany.’

‘Sorry guy am I pulling too hard.’

‘No keep going you’re doing good you’re doing good.’ Cat wasn’t sure if he meant talking or heaving so he tried both.

‘You two always seem to get into conflict. She is the one who has the most adjusting to be getting on with, but your ego keeps getting in the way.’ Then there was an earsplitting pop and the sound of a relieved android as Cat placed the Salad Cream bottle on the bed. The two were just catching their breath when a squelchy noise out in the corridor got Cat’s acute attention.

‘Kryten, it’s your ex.’ Kryten turned around and straightened up to find himself facing what basically looked like a giant fungally infected ball-sack covered in snot with a single giant eyeball on a stalk that swayed like a leech gingerly sensing the world around it.

‘Camille!’ said Kryten.

‘Are you pleased I’m back? I don’t belong with Hector, I love you Kryten, run away with me please.’

‘Camille, what’s brought this on!’

‘Is there someone new Kryten? Is that what it is?’

‘I’m so sorry Camille. You’ve come all this way and what we had was so special but I’ve moved on. I loved you Camille and I was devestated when you left but I’ve got a whole new life now with... with...’ Kryten looked around him in a panic. ‘...This... this keytar.’ Kryten picked up the keytar that he had no idea why it was there and tried to hold it in a romantic way.

‘You make such a nice couple. Please excuse me, I’m sorry to come bursting in like that. Have a nice life you two...’ And with that the genderfluid amorphous blob blobbed off down the corridor.

Cat crossed his arms proudly ‘Wow, pencileraserhead, you’re getting better with women already. That was almost gallant.’ And on the word gallant he sat straight down on the Salad Cream bottle and made a noise that you’d get a lot of Scrabble points if you tried to spell it.

cCO

Kochanski was all out of joint. She missed *her* Dave. *Her* Dave with his reconstructed hardlight hologrammatic heart. The Dave who would hold her and tell her everything was going to be ok, the intellectual auto-didact master of zero-G mixed marshall arts, the Dave who had had his penis reduced to the optimal size for pleasuring her, the Dave who tirelessly campaigned for cat rights and had fixed and upgraded Kryten and tried to help Cat participate in their mammalian team spirit whilst giving him the perfect amount of space to be a cat and do catty things.

And the adventures they had. The discovery that The Inquisitor was actually Kryten from 7 billion years in the future. The experiments that took place with the DNA machine, finding out what it was like to be a tree or a treefrog or a treefern. The time Kryten spilt mutated developing fluid all over their video collection and they climbed into their TVs and explored all their favourite shows for weeks, mixing up the storylines and creating worlds within worlds within worlds. Nothing that interesting seemed to happen to the crew in this universe. I mean an AR simulation of a fairground ride based on the life of someone of no particular significance complete with singing munchkins? Any takers?

The group dynamic was all wrong. Everything adventurey that happened to them was a result of Kryten’s petty interventions. Then she remembered that Kryten had lost his brother and was struggling with android-issues, classic stuff about class and identity and where you come from. But still, he was being a smegprick. Then she started thinking about Cat and how he kept talking English when they were disguised as GELFs. This made her laugh. She always found herself snarking at the Cat in a way that was too harsh. She felt a need to be funny and be like the guys because they seemed so hopeless at adapting to her. Things were too dangerous with Dave and Kryten so she found herself picking on the Cat which didn’t seem fair.

She liked what he said when they were trapped in the ducts. The only time he’d really opened up instead of just being the local quipping post. All this stuff about how food doesn’t taste till you eat it. It was exactly what the 17th century Irish philosopher Bishop Berkeley said, but Cat put it alot better. Interesting stuff happens to me only when I’m in the room, something like that. This didn’t mean that the Cat was smart though, just that Berkeley was a dummy. Or maybe Berkeley was a cat, and all the idelogues of modernity were cats sent back in time in a conspiracy to usher in individualism, selfishness, capitalism, internet cat-memes, resource depletion, intersteller mining and the evolution and progress of the cat race aboard Red Dwarf. Then she decided to save her imagination for the Community fanfic she was working on.

‘Did you know that the word autism was originally an abreviation of auto-eroticism?’

‘Still leafing through that old psych-manual but you’ve moved onto analysing the Cat?’ said Lister. He was wearing his white long-johns with the legs rolled up. The long-johns were always squeaky clean because Lister was loved and cared for and the white contrasted nicely with his soft beige skin. He’d come in and started awkwardly rifling around in the galley for a snack. Awkward because he was used to Kryten doing everything, spoiling him rotten, but when he called out for Kryten no response came. Everyone needs down time he thought as he chucked some leftovers onto a piece of bread and sealed it with another slice. He was getting twice as much smeg everywhere with half the arms. Seeing Lister trying to fend for himself was painful for Kochanski but she didn’t want to get into competition with Kryten over doing things for Lister he would be better off learning to deal with himself. Lister’s problem wasn’t that he had one arm but that he had seven.

‘Getting any better?’ she asked vaguely.

Lister smiled kindly at her. ‘I was just talking to these Black Supremicist musicians who travelled half way across the Universe to tell me I don’t belong here, that I should join them on this mission that I don’t even understand. Anyway the thing I noticed when I was talking was... I need my right hand to talk, I kind of twirl it round and pull all kinds of shapes and textures out of the air to express whatever words I’m saying. In fact if I’m honest I just flick my hand around the way I want and passively words just come out of my mouth to the same beat.’

Kochanski was smiling like a pinball machine not smiling but just being evernescent and like when the whole table lights up and just really pops. ‘And now?’

‘I dunno just feels dry and scripted. Everything I say, doesn’t really feel like I’m saying it unless it’s with the hand actions. I never realised it though before, that I do that.’

‘And you didn’t feel tempted to go with the musicans?’

‘Nah. This is where I belong lump it or not, it’s my... family,’ he said, staring into the fridge and looking for easy open options, looking for things that would become tasty only when he put them in his mouth.

Kochanski suddenly felt a flash of red hot guilt. All this talk of family and belonging. And remembering that Lister was an orphan and this was probably the best family he’d ever have. And the stuff with Kryten’s brother. Lister didn’t notice her leaving because he was feretting a stray chilli pickle from the back of the salad tray. When he’d straightened up to table height he wondered why Kochanski had changed into microscropic sawn off jeans, fishnets, biker boots and jacket and a chippy leather cap.

‘Jesus, the wardrobe department’s on overtime today, why the new look?’

‘Don’t you like it?’

‘It’s great, just wondering why the quick change is all...’

‘Because I thought you liked me like this. I thought you found it sexy.’

‘Why do you want me to find you sexy?’ asked Dave, finding her sexy.

‘Because you’re a sex God, Dave, because you are the God. Of. Sex.’

Lister hadn’t felt so angry since Kryten fitted him up with that poney prosthetic arm. ‘Don’t. Call. Me. God!!!’ Then he felt instantly terrible and went and sat by her.

‘Look, Camille...’ Kochanski-Camille gasped. ‘You’re not functioning properly, you’re too hung up on Kryten to read other people anymore. Kochanski in hot-pants, it’s a nice thought, but I’ve moved on, learnt things, grown.’ Busted, Kochanski-Camille turned back into ball-sack-mucus Camille because it was less effort than being Kochanski. ‘Things didn’t work out with Hector?’

‘It can never work blob on blob. We’ve been genetically engineered to give pleasure. There’s no give and take. But with Kryten it was different somehow. He didn’t just break my heart he broke my genetic programming. Impossibly, he wanted me to be happy and impossibly, I liked it. There’s no going back for me, I’ve broken my genetic programming, I am queer, unnatural, beyond, transcendant...’

‘Kryten’s changed a lot as well though. That was a big benchmark when he met you. But he’s not the droid you fell in love with Camille.’

cCO

Kryten had his hand up the Cat’s bum. He had his foot jammed against the medibed for leverage and with a giant heave there was another pop but this time the Salad Cream bottle came out worse for wear and Cat regretted that second Chicken Marengo. Just then Julie Burchill, wearing fake cat teeth with a giant papier mache doughnut with giant kitsch pastelly sprinkles around her neck kareered into the medibay on her spacebike, or rather *their* spacebike.

‘Cat come with me, you belong with us fellow cat’s, don’t you feel displaced?’ Julie Burchill was a British journalist from the 1990s who’d become obsessed with Cat culture in a similar way she’d always been obsessed with Judaism.

‘I don’t need a bunch of Cat’s to make me feel like a Cat. We’re not insecure that way like you apes. Besides this is my family, why would I leave, they give me things and allow me not to think too much.’

‘Wow what an insight into the way that cats view the family ideology. Teach me to be a cat, Cat...’

‘You can’t teach *this*’ said Cat, referring to himself by kind of flexing and posing. ‘If you want to be a Cat alls you got to do is stop trying so hard to be something, stop trying to belong all the time.’

‘You’re right how ironic. I’m usually good at being on my own. And I’m good at not giving a fuck what people think. I’m very self indulgent.’

Kochanski came in at this point. ‘Hi Julie Burchill, hi Cat, Kryten: I’m so sorry for the Last Tango in Swindon...’

‘Pardon, mam?’

‘I’m sorry for violating you with the Salad Cream.’

‘Cat?’ said Cat ‘Yes, Cat?’ said Cat ‘Thanks for accidently violating me with the Salad Cream. That’s OK Cat, it was pretty great to tell you the truth.’

‘What the smeg are you lot on about?’ said Julie Burchill, who was getting into saying smeg now. She’d got off her actually their spacebike now and was sitting on the giant donut, making herself at home, unscrewing a bottle of white wine and pouring it into a Erlenmeyer flask.

At this point God walked in. ‘God!’ squeaked Burchill.

‘I’m not God I’m not God I’m not God I’m not God I’m not God I’m not God I’m not God I’m not God I’m not God I’m not God I’m not God I’m not God I’m not God I’m not God I’m not God I’m not God I’m not God I’m not God I’m not God I’m not God. I. Am. Not. God!’ said Lister.

Kochanski was trying to cross reference Messiah complex with Denial in her dog eared psych manual as Burchill demurely left, swigging from her Erlenmeyer glass and saying simply ‘Whatevs smeghead!’ as she brushed past Lister. Lister awkwardly took a bight out of his sandwich and eyed the contents sceptically.

‘She was trying to get me to come with her. Said I belong with my fellow Cats. I said no girl I’m running with my homeboys...’ then he tacked on ‘and girl’ when he had panned as far as Kochanski.

‘You too aye? I was woken up this morning by these guys saying I was the Black God. I said no I’m just a bloke called Dave. I’m just trying to chill and look after my friends. Then Burchill turns up and says Cat should be with his fellow Cats and then Camille the blob turns up and says she *doesn’t* belong with the other blobs. I’m rooting for Camille, man, they’re a good blob, I hope they find someone or some group. Whatever works. That’s my motto. I didn’t manage to fix Kryten up after his spacebike accident with some impossibly perfectionist attitude or any training in robotics at all or like half the parts he had when he crashed y’know.’ Kryten was starting to look worried. ‘No I just patched in any old smeg and just got him going and isn’t that what makes him so special.’

‘Small off duty Czekoslovakian traffic warden,’ said Kryten.

‘Wha I’m sayin *is*. We’ve been through smeg together.’ Lister could tell he would have had more of a speech in him if he could use his right hand to get him some places. He persevered. ‘Once, I went into a wine bar... But it’s like the Beach Boys sang you got to be true to your school. What I mean *is*, it’s like when we turned Kryten into a human and he didn’t want to be human so we changed him back – and he must have felt a bit like I felt that time I went into a wine bar.’ Lister was starting to warm up. ‘So I guess what I’m saying *is*, we all just want to *stay*, we want things to be as normal as possible in a severely smegged up universe, no-one wants to rock the bug because we’re the boys from the... and girl from the dwarf’ and he did the special hand signal, where you hold as many hands as you have in front of you and letting them hang with the palms facing in, casually shake them from side to side, along with Cat, Kryten and Kochanski.

Just then Kochanski’s boyfriend, the hologrammatic hunk version of Dave from her own dimension, walked in.

‘Dave!’ gasped Kochanski as she ran to him. ‘I’ve missed you so much.’ Like cottage cheese with pineapple chunks, she thought as she placed her palms on his pecks. ‘Take me back to own home dimension, get me away from here and erase my whole memory of this freaky loser dimension.’

‘You can’t do that, you’re not a hologram or a computer,’ said Kryten.

‘It’s okay I can feel it all melting away into nothing anyway.’

Just then one of the Black Supremicist musicians teleported back in in a swirl of out of focus glitter and grabbed the keytar. ‘Sorry, forgot one,’ he said and beamed out in a disco haze.

‘Kryten, you bastard!’ said Camille, realising Kryten had lied to them.

‘What?’ said Kochanski.

‘By the way Kris,’ said Lister ‘there’s a pleasure GELF on board, they’re called Camille, but they also go by the name of...’

‘Cloister the stupid!’ interjected Julie Burchill, drunkenly swaggering into the room.

‘Oh smeg noragain,’ said Lister, staring at his sandwich. Then Burchill noticed the newcomer.

‘Oh my God I’m in love,’ said Julie Burchill to Kochanski’s Dave Camille who to her was a handsome middle aged Jewish man. Ever since she was a little girl Burchill had dreamed of meeting a handsome, rich, urbane Jewish man and also becoming a lesbian.

Lister looked down at his curry and easyreach sandwich and reached out for the Salad Dressing and our story ends on a freezeframe midway through Cat and Kryten both reaching out and shouting ‘Noooo-’.

**Author's Note:**

> The idea of Kryten being The Inquisitor is from The Last Temptation of Kryten by Richard Street


End file.
